Anyone Offer Conditional Bidding based on Bids?

In some cases it is hard to determine the value of an item due to lack of history. In these cases, worst case is you schedule a snipe and end up being the only bidder, realizing the starting bid was probably too high based on real market value, so you overpaid for the item. Do you have a feature, or can you create one in a future release where it does not snipe the auction unless a minimimum number of other bids have been placed? It doesn't have to check the number of bids seconds before auction close as that would really slow down your servers ability to place snipes I imagine. But a condition, say if there isn't at least X bids (probably usually 1) within 1 hour, or 1 minute of auction close, the snipe is canceled would be a very valuable feature.

It sounds like your question is directed at a particular product. This site covers all software for people for buy and sell on eBay (and other marketplaces) so I will take it as a general sniping question.

Using bidding as an indication of market value before the auction ends is not something I have heard of before, but I can understand the logic of it. I don't think you will find that feature in any existing sniper. You can search by highest bid in tools such as Prospector, which has sniping built-in, but I doubt it will check again before placing a bid as you describe.

I suppose the point of sniping is to set your highest bid and walk away, which doesn't work too well if you haven't already decided what your maximum is

Have you thought about using research tools such as Terapeak to get a longer market history and so more chance of finding unusual items? For antiques and collectibles the PriceMiner service includes online and offline sources (auction houses) to give a greater coverage.